Disaster and the Politics of Intervention

Andrew Lakoff

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780231519250
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Internationale Beziehungen

Government plays a critical role in mitigating individual and collective vulnerability to disaster. Through measures such as disaster relief, infrastructure development, and environmental regulation, public policy is central to making societies more resilient. However, the recent drive to replace public institutions with market mechanisms has challenged governmental efforts to manage collective risk. The contributors to this volume analyze the respective roles of the public and private sectors in the management of catastrophic risk, addressing questions such as: How should homeland security officials evaluate the risk posed by terrorist attacks and natural disasters? Are market-based interventions likely to mitigate our vulnerability to the effects of climate change? What is the appropriate relationship between non-governmental organizations and private security firms in responding to humanitarian emergencies? And how can philanthropic efforts to combat the AIDS crisis ensure ongoing access to life-saving drugs in the developing world? More generally, these essays point to the way thoughtful policy intervention can improve our capacity to withstand catastrophic events.

Additional Columbia / SSRC books on the Privatization of Risk and its Implications for Americans

Bailouts: Public Money, Private Profit Edited by Robert E. Wright

Health at Risk: America's Ailing Health System-and How to Heal It Edited by Jacob S. Hacker

Laid Off, Laid Low: Political and Economic Consequences of Employment Insecurity Edited by Katherine S. Newman

Pensions, Social Security, and the Privatization of Risk Edited by Mitchell A. Orenstein

CHAPTER ONE

Beyond Calculation |
A Democratic Response to Risk

SHEILA JASANOFF

Twice in the new millennium, in calamities barely eight months apart, first in Asia in December 2004 and again in the United States in August 2005, water played havoc with hundreds of thousands of human lives. The two disasters, a tidal wave (or tsunami, as the Japanese call it) and a hurricane, occurred worlds apart—spatially, socially, culturally, economically, in their apparent causes and impacts, and in the political and humanitarian responses that each evoked. But there were deep similarities as well. Both were catastrophic in scale, producing death, dislocation, and damage of unprecedented magnitude. Both were “natural” disasters, in that each originated in the workings of nature outside the bounds of human control, but both revealed the interactivity of the natural and the social in apportioning disaster’s consequences. Both also drew attention to the fact that we often learn most about risk—who is at risk, for what reasons, and to what degree—only in hindsight, after risk transmutes into harm. Reflecting on what was like and unlike in these two events allows us to reevaluate how far we have come, as enlightened societies, in attempting to manage risks of global consequence. What techniques have our rulers evolved for predicting the ills that affect large numbers and cut across jurisdictions, and how effectively can experts’ powers of prediction guard against harms that seem continually to befall the most vulnerable segments of humankind?

Like the other contributions to this volume, this chapter is about risk that, through its spatial scope, violence, or suddenness, overwhelms reason—in short, catastrophic risk—and our paradoxical attempts to cope with the irrational in rational terms. Whereas risk is normally seen as a property of the indeterminate future, an inexact but not incalculable foreshadowing of things to come, I will argue that risk is better conceived as an extrapolation ahead in time from misfortunes we already know, have experienced, or tried to master. In this respect, risk is a product of human imaginations disciplined and conditioned by an awareness of the past; put differently, risk is a disciplined projection of archived historical memory onto the blank screen of the future. That memory, however, is necessarily partial and selective: the past is not the same for everyone who experiences it, especially when interpreters are separated by divisions of status, income, and analytic capacity. As historians have shown us, the ruler’s memory does not recall prior events in the same way as that of the subaltern; post-disaster litigation reveals that causes invariably look different from the standpoints of the victims and the originators of risky enterprises. Even science, modernity’s most reliable identifier of causes, narrows the possible channels of explanation in the process of illuminating them.¹ It follows that, to enhance a society’s capacity for understanding and controlling risk, we have to widen our analytic horizon to take in more than the sciences of prediction. We have to become better skilled at developing strategies of collective recall and at seeing risk itself not only as the narrow concern of “management” but—consistent with the wider message of this volume—as part of the wider political preserve of “governance.”

I am not alone, of course, in seeing risk as memory bumped forward. To some degree, the entire enterprise of technical risk assessment arose from an ability to deploy history instrumentally, through gradually increasing sophistication with what the philosopher Ian Hacking has called the “taming of chance.”² The future, as inhabitants of the twentieth century gradually recognized, was not deterministic but governed by probabilities. Chance itself, however, was often not random but amenable to more or less reliable forms of accounting, and knowledge of the past was crucial to the accuracy of many forecasts. Our ability to compile and manipulate large numbers grew. The actuarial tabulation of recurrent bad events, from common illnesses and disabilities to accidents and financial ruin, and the estimation from these aggregated numbers of likely risk in individual lives formed the basis of the insurance industry, one of modernity’s signature social achievements. If in every life some harms must occur, then insurance promises that no one will have to face them alone and destitute, without any resources to compensate for injury and loss. Insurance spreads risk, equalizing to some extent the lot of the poor and vulnerable and the lot of the protected and rich.

The latter half of the twentieth century, however, gave rise to risks that escape the framework of actuarial prediction, in part because there is little or no direct historical experience to fall back on in evaluating them. Some threats are so infrequent, fantastical, slow to mature, spatially and temporally far-reaching, or causally complex that they are literally as well as figuratively incalculable; climate change, the product of centuries of industrialization, is but one example. Others arise through historically contingent human behaviors and human-environment interactions that no one, it seems, could have imagined, let alone foretold; fundamentalist religious terrorism and stratospheric ozone depletion can be cited as examples. Yet such risks may be catastrophic, at the level of individual as well as communal life. It is hard to date the precise moment of emergence of such incalculable risks, but a turning point may have been the explosion of the first nuclear weapon at the Trinity test site in the deserts of New Mexico on July 16, 1945. That initial public demonstration of the results of the Manhattan Project alerted the world to the possibility of total annihilation. It is said that, moments before the Trinity blast, the eminent physicist Enrico Fermi “began offering anyone listening a wager on ‘whether or not the bomb would ignite the atmosphere, and if so, whether it would merely destroy New Mexico or destroy the world.’”³ Since then, not only the continued threat of a nuclear holocaust but a succession of more or less devastating natural and human-made disasters have kept alive the specter of essentially incalculable, and hence uninsurable, risks.⁴ How to govern these—not simply manage them—has emerged as one of the great technical, political, and ethical challenges of the early twenty-first century.

Most people tend to think of natural or technological disasters when confronted by the term “catastrophic risk”: floods, wildfires, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, war, terrorism, and the more human-scaled tragedies of falling bridges, derailed trains, burning buildings, or airplane crashes. But in 2009, as in 1929, the world became acutely aware that risk and chance can destroy the world of finance as they can any complicated structure built on mistaken expert understandings of how things work. Unpredicted as little as a few weeks before the meltdown on Wall Street, the economic crisis that began in 2008 exhibited the expanded scale, cross-jurisdictional reach, and resulting unmanageability of risks in a highly networked world society. A global breakdown in the financial system portended catastrophe for many nations in terms of lost jobs, homelessness, rising social unrest, increased disease incidence, and other indicators of distress. Yet, as the case of Iceland, an early victim of the meltdown, dramatically demonstrated, many sovereign states are powerless to fix problems whose causes and consequences are distributed in often non-transparent ways among agents lying partly or wholly outside national control. In addition to the well-known democratic deficits of our expert-ruled societies, these globally dispersed hazards point, as Andrew Lakoff’s introduction suggests, to serious deficits in the existing institutions of risk governance.

Below, I reflect on the normative dimensions of such problems. How, with what instruments, by whom, and for whose benefit should risks, especially the incalculable ones, be governed? Four sets of difficulties have proved intransigent. First, there is the barrier of culture: how can we assess the likely impacts of events of potentially global consequence with analytic imaginations bounded by culturally conditioned ideas of rationality and by particular ways of seeing and knowing risk? Second, there is the challenge of bureaucratic reductionism: how can administrative institutions draw appropriate lessons from the past, given their tendency to simplify for convenience the richness and complexity of human experience? Third, there is the imperative of ethics: whose responsibility is it to identify who is at risk and from what or to address associated distributive questions about whose vulnerabilities are important and whose voices should count in setting priorities? Fourth, there are the constraints of economics: given the unequal impacts of risk, how should we cope with dilemmas about allocating scarce preventive and remedial resources?

I approach these problems by first reviewing how they played out, or more accurately were downplayed, in the development of quantitative risk analysis as a favored discourse of public policy. I then show how these problems manifested themselves in the two natural disasters with which this chapter began, the Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina. I conclude by outlining a more modest, experiential, and inclusive approach to dealing with the persistent obstacles to democratic risk governance, using analytic strategies that I term “technologies of humility.”⁵

THE CALCULUS OF CONTROL

In the latter half of the terrifying twentieth century, risk became a major concern of governments. While (or possibly because) they had not been able to control the slides into two catastrophic world wars, advanced industrial states felt increasingly compelled to provide reassurance that they would manage their citizens’ destinies better in the future. In part, this meant that states had to rein in the technologies their wars had done so much to promote: they had to show that chemicals, biological agents and (later) genetic modification of living things, transportation, nuclear weapons, and instruments of surveillance and mass communication could all be safely redeployed in the service of peace, prosperity, and welfare. In part, it meant demonstrating that public officials can foresee, and keep from materializing, new dangers on the horizon, dangers stemming from either the natural or the social world or from their unpredictable interaction. The list of such hazards seems limitless. The decades on either side of the millennium divide placed on the agenda of global risk prevention new environmental issues, such as deforestation, ozone depletion, species loss, and climate change; new threats to peace from nuclear first strikes or, after September 11, 2001, global terror; new fears of pandemics, from AIDS to avian influenza; new, seemingly ineradicable social “diseases,” such as poverty, scarcity, and violations of human rights; and new economic threats from massive breakdowns in the banking and investment sectors.

Demonstrations of the state’s ability to manage risks, moreover, had to be made under changing sociopolitical circumstances that challenged the legitimacy of public reason. With increasing wealth, more was at stake in getting things wrong, and the enormous successes of modern technology bred rising expectations about what could be controlled and should not be left to chance. Demands for transparency grew as publics asked to look behind the decisions of both elected and appointed rulers and questioned their expert justifications. In democratic societies, citizens gained progressively more access to information, and through the expanding power of the media and the exponential growth of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), they also became better equipped to hold state authorities accountable for errors of omission and commission. NGOs acquired and skillfully deployed their own specialized knowledge, challenging the hegemony of government and corporate experts. At the same time, the indeterminacy and complexity of many novel risks, and their refusal to stay within neatly drawn geopolitical lines, taxed the power of nation-states to offer to global publics credible predictions and convincing remedies.

The vast and growing literature on risk chronicles the profound resulting transformations in the complexion of social and political life. To begin with, risk has shifted its locus almost imperceptibly from being principally a managerial problem to one that is seen also as deeply political; in other words, the bureaucratic task of risk management is now seen to be just one aspect of the broader enterprise of risk governance. Risk management was traditionally considered a domain for experts. Risk governance by contrast requires the involvement of citizens and their political representatives. Whereas management entailed mainly the tasks of identifying and controlling risks, often associated with single causes, governance takes as its purview the sociopolitical environments in which risks originate and concerns itself with explicitly political choices: for example, how to weigh trade-offs among competing risks, how to communicate with affected (and disaffected) publics, and how to integrate demands for social justice into analytic processes once seen as largely technical.

Many incremental changes converged to bring about this shift, changes in domains of knowledge as well as of social organization and behavior. On the side of knowledge, a key development was the emergence and spread of new formal techniques of risk analysis—aimed at disciplining the incalculable through sophisticated forms of calculation. Once the preserve of actuaries and insurers, risk assessment became by the end of the twentieth century an indispensable instrument in the toolkit of public administration. Mathematical models generating estimates of probable harm were developed for issues as diverse as tracking the dispersal of chemicals in the environment and their effects on people or ecosystems, tracing the spread of introduced genes from one organism to another, measuring the likelihood of accidents at nuclear and chemical plants, and calculating the effects of global mean temperature rise on pathogens or storm surges. The proliferation of these methods raised new questions for governments: whose knowledge should states rely on; how should they certify policy-relevant knowledge as reliable; how should expert judgments be made publicly accountable; and how should conflicts among experts, interest groups, and indeed national governments be resolved?⁶

On the side of social transformation, theorists focused, in the first instance, on the disruptive effects of risk on preexis...